• Journal of Educational Research in Mathematics
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.525-547
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• 2015

This study analyzed the written texts of textbook and the teacher's discourse explaining 'the relationship between quadratic functions and quadratic equations' in the 9th grade high school mathematics class. Data consisted of the lecture recordings and the textbooks were analyzed based on the Halliday's systemic functional linguistics. According to the results, the written texts of the textbook used lexico-grammatical strategies such as generalization using hyponomy of meanings, mathematical objectification through nominalization and materialization of meaning through change in themes to compose mathematical concepts. The textbook generalized from an example in the description of formulating mathematical concepts, and in this process the organizational interactions of discourse-semantic level and lexico-grammartical level appeared. On the other hand, the teacher's doscourse appeared the change in transitivity and the addition of the reasons and the process. Also the teacher used explanation process of formulating the relationship between quadratic functions and quadratic equations. The linguistic characteristics of the teacher were linguistic implication and omission of lexemes due to contextual ommission. And there was no use of structural lexico-grammatical resources that influence the discourse-semantic level. This results provide a new framework for analyzing mathematical discourse, and suggest the lexico-grammatical strategies that can be used to explain mathematical concepts by teachers in math classrooms.

• Education of Primary School Mathematics
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.445-459
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• 2018

The purpose of this study is to provide a method to help elementary school students learn ratio-related concepts effectively through visual representations. This study was conducted to identify the differences in the composition of ratio-related concepts between Korean and Singaporean textbooks, reconstruct a unit of proportional expressions and distributions by using visual representations and confirm the differences in performance between an experimental and a comparison group of 6th grade students. While the experimental group mathematics lessons is from the reconstructed textbook, the comparison group lessons is from an existing textbook that does not include any reconstructive representations. A t-test of mean was applied to determine the differences between the experimental and comparison group. Analysis revealed significant differences in the mean between the experimental group and the comparison group, and the intermediate level group showed more improvement compared to the higher and lower level groups. An implication of this study is that the application of visual representations can assist students' understanding of ratio-related concepts.

• Journal of Educational Research in Mathematics
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.395-418
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• 2007

The purpose of this study was to analyze the influence of mathematical tasks on mathematical communication. Mathematical tasks were classified into four different levels according to cognitive demands, such as memorization, procedure, concept, and exploration. For this study, 24 students were selected from the 5th grade of an elementary school located in Seoul. They were randomly assigned into six groups to control the effects of extraneous variables on the main study. Mathematical tasks for this study were developed on the basis of cognitive demands and then two different tasks were randomly assigned to each group. Before the experiment began, students were trained for effective communication for two months. All the procedures of students' learning were videotaped and transcripted. Both quantitative and qualitative methods were applied to analyze the data. The findings of this study point out that the levels of mathematical tasks were positively correlated to students' participation in mathematical communication, meaning that tasks with higher cognitive demands tend to promote students' active participation in communication with inquiry-based questions. Secondly, the result of this study indicated that the level of students' mathematical justification was influenced by mathematical tasks. That is, the forms of justification changed toward mathematical logic from authorities such as textbooks or teachers according to the levels of tasks. Thirdly, it found out that tasks with higher cognitive demands promoted various negotiation processes. The results of this study implies that cognitively complex tasks should be offered in the classroom to promote students' active mathematical communication, various mathematical tasks and the diverse teaching models should be developed, and teacher education should be enhanced to improve teachers' awareness of mathematical tasks.